Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR) hosted its twenty-first Lahore Policy Exchange talk on “Getting to English through the mother-tongue.” It is obvious that language skills have a strong bearing on student outcomes as well as the ability to think critically. Most countries, as is the case with Pakistan, engage with a language landscape characterized by a multiplicity of local languages, a national language and a high level of social demand for English. When it comes to the choice of language for education, English is often counter-posed to the rest. But is this choice a zero-sum game? Or is it more a matter of deciding on which language(s) to adopt at what stage of schooling as a subject or Medium of Instruction (MoI), for optimizing language learning as well as learning across subjects. Panel: 1) Mr. Abbas Rashid (Executive Director, SAHE) – will frame the language issue in education in Pakistan across classroom and policy dimensions with input from a report on an international conference on language and learning, hosted by SAHE in Lahore last year 2) Dr. Tayyaba Tamim (Associate Professor and Research Fellow at Centre for Research in Economics and Business, Lahore School of Economics) – will discuss the role of L1 in L2 classrooms: an ethnocognitive study 3) Mr. Qamar ul Islam Raja (Chairman, Punjab Education Foundation) – will respond to the issues raised by the earlier speakers Dr. Faisal Bari (Fellow, CDPR and Director, IDEAS) – will moderate the session.

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